by Paul Theroux
This makes the Hand-over on July 1 like an Asian version of an Appointment in Samarra, in which the escaped Chinese find themselves in the wrong place, entangled after all with the very government they had sought to avoid.
Some of these refugees comprised the long line of the walking wounded ahead of me at the herbalist's, and like them, to kill time, I read the papers. We were not the only ailing people. It was mid-February, and the South China Morning Post was reporting the deteriorating health of Deng Xiaoping. There were subtle hints that it was serious. The previous day the Chinese authorities did not say Deng was well, which meant he was ill. "No big change" today meant a definite change. Share prices fell with the headline "Leaders Gather Amid Fears for Deng."
No one in the waiting room seemed to care very much that Deng was sick. Hong Kong newspapers are among the freest in the world, distinguished by vigorous political, business, and investigative reporting. But it was the crime stories that riveted the readers in the herbalist's waiting room. Serious crime is low in Hong Kong; the streets are generally safe; there is hardly any graffiti. But when a crime is committed, it is nearly always bizarre.
That morning it was "Worker with Criminal Face." Mak King-man, a harmless computer worker with "a criminal-like face," had run amok after years of persecution by police, who had repeatedly picked him up on suspicion, because of his "sinister looks." He was now being tried for running through a housing block "setting fires to umbrellas." In the previous days I read "Shouting Woman Hacked to Death" (slashed forty times for yelling); "'Voices' Drove Father to Chop Baby Girl"; "Man Rapes Step-Daughter on Toilet"; "Boiling Oil Victim" (angry wife deep-fries husband); "Teenager Had Sex with Sister" ("because they were curious about sex"); and "Toilet Charge" (buggery in a toilet stall in Taikoo Shing).
Dr. Gwai took my pulse, diagnosed tungfung (gout), put me on a radical vegetarian diet, and gave me three pounds of mulch in paper bags, which the Ritz-Carlton's room service (dial 3) obligingly boiled up for me, one pound a day. I drank the foul result, a bowl of black, twiggy-tasting water, which looked like essence of mud puddle.
I made more visits to the herbalist, and I felt that in treating my tung fung I was engaged in an intense process of Hong Kong acculturation—making friends, reading the papers, chin wagging, and learning things. The herbalist's waiting room was a cross section of Hong Kong society: tycoons and paupers, young and old, traditional and modern, most with cellular phones, lots with pagers and beepers. The new "Society" issue of Hong Kong Tatler, listing the billionaires and playboys, lay in Dr. Gwai's stack of magazines. Sample entry: "Brenda Chau. With her husband Kai-Bong, Chau is a party lover with a penchant for glitz. She favours bright colours, especially pink, and has a gold mansion..."
At just about the time I recovered my former nimble footwork, Deng Xiaoping died.
"You're lucky!" people said, regarding this act of God as auspicious: I was here to write about Hong Kong, and Deng does me the favor of dropping dead.
A deathwatch was exactly how I had envisaged any visit to Hong Kong in these latter days—"Contemplating the mysteries of death" was how Jan Morris had described her own view in her valedictory book on the place. But no crash followed Deng's demise. There was hardly a murmur in the stock market. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index, which had been wavering with his illness, jumped 317 points as soon as Deng was confirmed cold, on February 20, and rose another 33 points the next day. "Sell on rumor, buy on news" is a Hang Seng rule. Some flags were flown at half mast, but all Union Jacks stayed at the top of their poles.
In the following days, many Hong Kongers lined up to sign the visitors' book at Xinhua, the New China News Agency, China's unofficial consulate in Hong Kong. At ten A.M. on the day of Deng's cremation the cross-harbor Star Ferries blew their whistles and some buses of the China Bus Company fleet were decorated with black bunting. But it was a working day like all days in Hong Kong.
The minute of silence in Hong Kong out of respect for Deng on February 26 was an utter failure in the screeching city of pile drivers and traffic and pop songs and human voices in crowds speaking plonkingly in Cantonese on cellular phones.
Some members of Hong Kong's small but vocal pro-China faction implored Deng's relatives to release a few spoonfuls of the paramount leader's ashes to sprinkle in Hong Kong Harbor. It was Deng's wish to be present for the Hand-over of Hong Kong to China at midnight on June 30 this year, and a portion of his ashes dissolved in the harbor could stand for him in a sort of watery way, as Tincture of Liquefied Leader on a State Visit.
In the event, the plea was ignored, and Deng's ashes were scattered secretly by his family on an unidentified stretch of China's coast.
It had seemed to me a matter of urgency that I see the British governor, Christopher Patten, "the last colonial oppressor," as he self-mockingly styles himself. This being tiny Hong Kong, Government House was just a few minutes' ride on a 25-cent tram, Causeway Bay to Central, from the herbalist's fourth-floor walk-up to one of Hong Kong's most venerable buildings, finished in 1855, and dwarfed by the skyscrapers around it.
The gate on Upper Albert Road had been flung open for me. I was greeted by the police and shown to a waiting room. On the wall were rows of portraits, beginning with Captain Charles Elliott, who had annexed Hong Kong but on such poor terms he was recalled and discredited; the rest were all the past governors since 1843, beginning with the first, Pottinger, and on through Bonham, Sir Hercules Robinson, Bowring, Pope Hennessy, DeVoeux, all of them looking like swashbucklers. The later governors looked duller, meaner, more politically sinuous: Young, Grantham, Black, MacLehose, Youde, and Wilson had the smugness of company directors who could be summed up in the pitiless word "suits."
Patten, the last of this lot, was not pictured and will perhaps never be pictured, for it is hard to imagine the Chinese taking the trouble to hoist the portrait of someone they so thoroughly despise and have vilified over the past five years. He is known universally as Chris. He is witty and well educated, from a modest background, and he rose through the ranks of the Conservative Party (researcher, speech writer, M.P. for Bath) to be a member of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet, and it was while serving there that he urged Mrs. Thatcher to walk the plank, which she reluctantly did. John Major is said to be a mate of Patten's. Major has spoken of Patten as being the next leader of the Tory Party, though when I asked Patten about this, he said, "I've heard that rumor too. I wish they would say something to me!"
"Hello," he said, stepping briskly into the room like a country doctor seeing his next patient. "Let's go to my office. Nice to see you again."
That "again" was an excellent touch, considering it had been about twelve years since I had seen him. It was easy for me to remember, because when he had been a member of Parliament, he had said complimentary things about my supposedly Anglophobic books. Patten has visibly aged since he came to Hong Kong. The five years as governor have made him look unconvincingly older, like a young actor in makeup, whose complexion is just a touch too florid, who put on weight and got his hair dusted white for the part of a statesman and potential stroke victim. After all, this is not an old croak but an animated and highly intelligent fellow of fifty-three in suede loafers, and you get the feeling that in a different job, in a different place—prime minister, perhaps—he will look physically different, younger and not so full of dim sum.
We went to his office, followed by his private secretary, Mr. Llewellyn, who had already started scribbling notes of our conversation. I was talking and listening, yet I was distracted. The feng shui in Government House is famously awry. Hong Kong is one of the last repositories of Chinese myth and tradition (dragon legends, cricket fights, card games, big families), and no Chinese superstition is more assiduously studied—by Hong Kong businessmen especially—than feng shui. This so-called "wind-water" determines the mood and fortunes of a site. The classical Five Elements of wood, water, fire, iron, and earth must be harmoniously balanced in buildings, offices, and residences alike, or disor
der will occur. Patten's office seemed to bear out the bad tidings of the geomancers. The gray walls, the few windows, and the poor light—no fire, no water—were all obstacles to the free flow of energy called ch'i. The governor sat under a large photograph of one of his daughters and under the only crucifix I have ever seen in a government office in my life.
It is impossible not to like someone whom the Chinese have called a liar, a clown, a serpent, and "a strutting prostitute," who has been snubbed at the highest levels. Patten had arrived in Hong Kong in July 1992, and before long he announced various democratic reforms, some of which called for free elections, and has since battled on. Many people have wondered, out loud and in print, why Patten has spoken so vigorously of reform so late in the day. I asked him that.
"What have I done? I've responded to social and political developments," he said to me. "If we hadn't responded—if we'd done much less—we might have had a quiet time with China, but we would have had a bloody awful time with the people here."
The mainland Chinese still hate him for his insolence in attempting these late reforms, and the pro-China factions in Hong Kong hate him out of sycophancy to China. The pro-democracy people in Hong Kong say he has not been democratic enough, and that he has not set up, as he said he would, the Court of Final Appeal, Hong Kong's equivalent of the United States Supreme Court. Yet the outgoing governor's approval ratings are significantly higher than those of his successor, Tung Cheehwa, China's choice.
Patten obviously relishes the irony of being the people's choice. He approached the job shrewdly, giving many speeches and press interviews, making himself visible, going on walkabouts in the urban throng and giving himself such a Hong Kong–friendly persona of hard worker and trencherman that he had a heart attack in the year after he arrived. His ratings soared. Nothing like infarction and angioplasty to endear yourself to fellow workaholics.
"I feel—forgive me for sounding sanctimonious—that I have been living out a Victorian hymn, doing well by doing the right thing."
Patten is perhaps aware that he is the Hong Kong governor people will remember, and though this job could have been a wilderness for him, it has raised his profile as he has made it a platform for his views on political philosophy. Several times he introduced a subject by saying, "I'm just enough of a Marxist to believe...," but he spoke at such speed that I got the first half of the tantalizing sentence and not the last.
"What is astonishing is how moderate and responsible people are politically," he was saying.
Patten, as always, was praising Hong Kong people in the most trusting and likable way. This praise and his friendliness are a rarity, for all the Chinese leaders have ever said is how subversive and untrustworthy Hong Kongers could be, and if you give them too much leeway, they will overthrow the Chinese government. In 1987, Deng had said, "We cannot accept people who want to use democracy to turn Hong Kong into an anti-Chinese base."
But the current legislature in Hong Kong, a third of it having gained seats in free elections, has proven its integrity. "It is only a slight exaggeration to say that this is perhaps the only legislature where people don't debate by punching each other on the nose," Patten said. "What I find most encouraging is the way people here have reacted in the last few months to the curtailment of their freedom. It disproves what outsiders say about people in Hong Kong: 'No one gives a toss about human rights. All they care about is money.'"
It seemed to me, as it did to many people in Hong Kong, that human rights and prosperity were linked. The clear-sighted Hong Kongers cared about both freedom and money; using their lunch hour to demonstrate on each anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre was an illustration of that balance of priorities. Hong Kong, with its dress codes and its class structure, is a notoriously philistine and trend-spotting place, but perhaps no more so than any other important financial center. And it is distinctly Hong Kong. Full of lawyers, bankers, accountants, and businessmen, it has good bookstores, too, but is not at all bookish. All these careerists in a hurry and on the make are natural supporters of the lively arts, for a musical or a dance performance can be turned into a social occasion. The most surprising thing is that there are any boat rockers and big mouths in Hong Kong, and yet there are a fair number, and some have paid a high price for it. A few years ago, the Hong Kong entrepreneur and publisher Jimmy Lai wrote an open letter to the Chinese premier Li Peng after Li boasted of killing students in Tiananmen Square. Mr. Lai called Li "a turtle's egg"—quaint-sounding in English but a crude term of abuse in Chinese—and his stores were shut down all over China.
Patten sees the Hong Kong opposition as constructive, farsighted, and hardly radical. Firebrands are in short supply. "What do we have? A couple of dozen Trots. What else? Martin Lee. Nobody could conceive of Martin Lee as a radical threat. We've had 139 demonstrations in front of the New China News Agency—and only one arrest!"
As the question "So what's the problem?" passed through my mind, Patten was saying, "The Chinese have three problems. Firstly, the Chinese see everything we do here through the prism of their reaction to the imperialist aggression of the nineteenth century. For example, we are constantly being lectured about the opium trade. Every time we send someone to Beijing they're shown a propaganda film about this. As if it's news to us!"
The Opium Wars seem like an antique phrase buried in an old history book, but it is vivid in Chinese demonology, and it is usually a mistake to underestimate the depth of the national memory, whether to illustrate a genuine slight or to use as a wicked pretext. British gunboats shelling Chinese ports and defeating them in battle in order to sell them British East India Company opium for Chinese silver has never been forgotten, precisely because it ended with the British gaining Hong Kong.
Dismissing this, Patten added, "Secondly, there are questions in their mind. Will we make off with the reserves? Will we fuck things up before we go?"
Smiling, as I was writing Will we fuck things up, Patten said, "And thirdly, there have been genuine problems of comprehension in knowing how a free society ticks—understanding the movement of goods and ideas." Expanding on this last point, he said, "Can you really expect an old Chinese cadre to understand the rule of law? Since Tiananmen, the Chinese have been seriously worried about control. Those old gentlemen saw over a million people demonstrating in a Chinese city. I think that made some Chinese officials jolly anxious."
It became obvious to me that a great deal of what Patten was saying was in reaction to all the smelly little orthodoxies he has had to endure in the past five years. In particular, the term "Asian values" seemed to rankle. It was nonsense, he said. What were Asian values? Who embodied them? One had to study the views of Lee Kwan Yew, Prince Sihanouk, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the prime ministers of Taiwan and Japan to see the range of opinion in Asia.
But values were something else. "I think values are universal. I don't think freedom of speech, of assembly, or habeas corpus are looked at differently in Asia than in the West. It's insulting to suggest it."
The intensity of Hong Kong's last days, this unlikely but inevitable ending, which to some minds is like a fatal illness, had made Patten more of a philosopher—with a philosopher's smiling and pedantic pugnacity—and less of a politician. He was now interested mainly in the bigger questions, and this mood had made him impatient with the utterances of the Chinese leadership and their mouthpieces.
Leaving Government House, walking under the porte-cochère and the flower beds to the gate, to hail a taxi on Upper Albert Road, I marveled at the strangeness of turning Hong Kong, this furious engine of capitalism and free speech—and this very mansion, with its flower beds and portraits—over to China. Such a hand-over has never happened so peacefully in the history of the world.
II
Hong Kong has existed since the reign of the mythical Yellow Emperor, when Chinese history began.
"It was a barren rock," the more tendentious historians say of Hong Kong, quoting Lord Palmerston, but for six thousand years Ho
ng Kong was China, and Chinese people lived there. They were the ancestors of the villagers and fishing folk whom the British confronted when they used the Pearl River delta as an anchorage for their blockading gunboats and drug-running ships in the Opium Wars. This period is an amazing story, which starts with the craze for tea drinking in Britain in the eighteenth century. The tea was imported from China in such large quantities that it tilted the balance of trade, and Britain, having nothing to sell the Chinese, had to pay for the tea in silver. When Britain desperately tried to interest the Chinese in British woolens and trinkets, the emperor laughed and demanded silver and obedience. Meanwhile, the British had taken over the opium trade from the Portuguese, who had been selling opium to the Chinese for hundreds of years; the number of Chinese opium smokers had also increased markedly by the early nineteenth century. Britain, owning India, owned the largest supply of opium in the world, and with a monopoly of the drug business, solved the balance-of-trade problem by shipping tons of the stuff illegally on East India Company ships. Opium went up the Pearl River; it was smuggled through scores of coastal towns; it created a subculture of bribery in China. A chest of opium weighed 140 pounds. Shipments in the hundreds of chests in the late eighteenth century rose to thousands in the nineteenth. Between 1835 and 1839, many thousands of tons of opium went into China, demoralizing the country. India's largest export was the making of the Raj. It was China's ruin, a loss of money, prestige, and—with so many addicts—manpower.
